Events are ubiquitous in the world of Infrastructure Management, described herein as including Enterprise Management, Security Management and Storage Management. Events typically have several attributes such as timestamp, severity, source, and action. One of the main attributes of an event is the Message attribute. As an example, a message could be the following: “E1005 Backup Job (JobID=5643) failed due on server.” Textual messages are amenable to human consumption, allowing a human operator, for instance to visually inspect, sort, and filter events. However, events are also consumed by automation engines, referred to herein as “machine consumption.” Machine consumption may include parsing the information inside the message attribute. As an example, in order to trigger an automated workflow process in response to a “backup job failed” event, the JobID parameter is extracted from the textual message. This extraction or parsing has the draw back of being subject to changes in the formatting of the message due to regular software updates or due to other circumstances. Each time the human readable text message format for the event is changed through updates to the system, the parsing routine must also be changed to allow the data to be extracted.
Simple Network Management Protocol (“SNMP”) traps can be used to relay a condition or an event. However, it is problematic to determine if a network or storage component is capable of producing an event via SNMP, and if so, the categories and types of events produced. This limitation, combined with a lack of machine-readable event data, makes it difficult to employ SNMP in storage management automation. Products such as Unicenter, developed by Computer Associates (“CA”), the assignee of the present application, provide capabilities to receive events from remote agents. However, in many instances the event management component has no way of establishing the possible events that can be received, making it difficult to create automated management workflows and practices.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method to generate and use events suitable for machine consumption to facilitate automated workflow management.